WEBSTER-COOLEY LANGUAGE. SERIES

ELEMENTARY

COMPOSITION

BY

W. F. WEBSTER

Principal of the East High School, Minneapolis, Minnesota

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
BOSTON: 4 PARK STREET; NEW YORK: 85 FIFTH AVENUE
CHICAGO: 378-388 WABASH AVENUE

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

EDUCATION DEPT.

с

Acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Charles
Scribner's Sons for their kind permission to use se-
lections from the writings of Henry van Dyke and
Robert Louis Stevenson; to the Bobbs-Merrill Co.
for the use of a selection from James Whitcomb
Riley; to Little, Brown & Co. for the use of "The
True Ballad of the King's Singer," by Helen Hunt
Jackson; and to the American Book Company for
the use of "The Origin of Rivers," from Baldwin's
"School Readings by Grades."

PREFACE.

COMPOSITION and grammar are very intimately bound together. In the earlier years of a school course, they are generally considered as one subject, - language; but in the later years they are pursued as separate subjects. Among educators there is a difference of opinion regarding the time when composition and grammar should be taught. One group, and that the larger, drop the regular study of composition when the study of grammar begins. This may be in the sixth, seventh, or eighth year of a school course, rarely as late as the eighth. They aver that there is not time to pursue both grammar and composition; and as grammar must be finished before the high school period, composition, except the writing of occasional essays, must be dropped. They say, too, that while studying grammar, a child is learning composition; for familiarity with the principles governing a language is a direct and positive influence leading to correct expression.

The second group hold that a knowledge of the grammar of a language is a great aid to expression; but that expression is not best learned through grammar alone. Grammar deals only

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